The Daily Worker Newspaper, October 23, 1926, Page 13

oe Airicsipiiniaiaper—viily tet ticitisiaee ante Capitalist Propaganda in the Air By M. CHILOFSKY. N six years time the radio industry has developed from an infant into a mighty giant, Radio is now a prac- tical necessity tothe economic and commercial life of the country. Com- munication by telegraph is giving way to that by radio. Engineers haye showii it practical to dispatch and reg- ulate the movement of trains thru radio, on the coast radio weather re- ports, radio danger signals and beacon lights for ships and airships are in use, and the stride of broadcasting is immense. Radio, atcording to the latest re- Ports, is now @ five-billiondollar in- dustry. The radio industry is not dif- ferent than any other industry in the United States as far as its economic . development is concerned. In the be- ginning there is a spurt of competi- tion, and then comes the inevitable characteristic of modern capitalism— monopoly. <Altho.the industry is still in its incipient stage, the courts of the country are already flooded with all sorts of complaints and suits for violations of the anti-trust law and in- fringements of patent rights. The bulk of the radio industry is in the hands of, the Morgan-~ontrolléd corporation, the General Electric Co., and its subsidiaries, the Radio Corpo- With the aid of their press they build an “air” circulation and with the aid of the radio they ®uild their newspa- per circulation. 3 Well-known stations command, a high price for thelr broadcast adver- tising. The big New York and Chi- cago stations charge as high as $700 }. an hour. It is timated that there are twenty million radio listeners in the country, a potential market and audience, : Due to “philanthropic” capitalism, which gives up a share of its surplus value to what is called “good will” advertising, we are able to get all the free music, entertainment and propa- ganda wé can stomach. < Tune in any station on a hot sum- mer evening and the air is fairly alive with strains of an “Eskimo love song.” We almost wish we were in Alaska, but we are told by the announcer to drink a certain brand of ginger ale and we will feel as tho we were up on the North Pole. Sometimes we are carried away by the melodious music of Crieg’s “Oriental,” or the “Arabian Dance.” “The Magic Carpet” takes us to the orient until our reveries are abruptly and prosaically disturbed with the announcement that the pro- gram is being given by the manufac- turers of such and such carpets and rugs. Of , the farmer is not ration of America and the National |megiected in this enormous propaganda Broadcasting Co., which, in its turn, controls a chain of stations across the continent. The industrialist and banker, Owen D. Young, of Dawes Plan fame, is the chairman of both these organizations. We will not concern ourselves so much with the radio industry as a whole, but will take one of its tmpor- tant phases, that is broadcasting. America, the leading imperialist coun- try, is far ahead of any other country in the development of radio. Out of the estimated eight hundred stations in the world the United States has five hundred and eighty-six. ' Most ofthe broadcasting stations are controlled and operated by the large capitalist newspapers and radio corporations and a few by religious societies. Some of the most powerful stations are the ones controlled by the newspapers,/which use them as:a sort of supplement to sell By A. H. HOOT to kill, Seventy bodies rid- dled by English bullets on the pave- ments of Shanghai. Several: days later two million hands ceased work. Countless multitudes marching-behind banners. Workers, peasants, students, professors, all China arrayed. against imperialism. Gunboats steam in the Pacific, English, American and Japan- ese troops disembark, machine guns lay low dozeng of yellow corpses’ on their native soil. Gold, lead and pow- der triumph over the breasts of the people, F This occurred in 1925. But China, the tmmense China of 840,000,000 souls, has been in revolt for a quarter of a century. The liberal bourgeois revolution has been achieved. The worker-peasant revolution is beginning to be born. The feudal barons of the old bureaucratic aristocracy have not yet lost all their power. They torture and massacre.with the money and arms of the imperialists. In the shadow of this deglining feudalism the new-born capitalism is bringing about the resurrection of serfdom, is imposing labor upon children. But the hungry worker carries his portion to the trade union, together with his hopes and his will, Class solidarity becomes an actuality in the battle. The peasants organize volunteer battalions of pickets. The arrogance of the foreign bayonets rests only on the security of the big naval guns di- rected against the mouths of rivers. Two huge armies oppose one another on tho continent, an immense strug: gle, a terrible epopee! Tho telegraph and newspapers transmit the echoes to~us: factory disorders, street \ scheme. He gets his barn dance music, his facts and figures on stock raising thru the courtesy and magha- nimity of Sears, Roebuck and Co. To simply complain about the music would get us nowhere, nor is this our aim, especially since at times we ac- tually get bits of good music, What concerns the working class more than anything else {s the effects of the systematic propaganda that comes over the ether. With a radio in your house you can- not be cut off from any event in the world, country, state or city, unless it be news of a labor’striggle. Capital- ism will dish our your news, will tell the housewife how to make éake ‘or’ how to raise her children so that they will be “real Americans,” why her son should join the Citizens’ Military ‘Training Camps, etc. For the son him- self all the various kinds of sporting news; and Little Johnny gets his boy advertising. | scout stories and fairy tales. prevents us from seeing or hearing anything else. But were we able to come nearer to that Deople so far re- moved and so little known by our un- affected but implicated occident— were we able to grasp its life and to penetrate its creative thought, we would then perceive the touching mes- sages capable of extending and render- ing more precise the picture we have formed of them. Here are some of the messages in which the heart of a whole people beats. In an essay im the Chinese Recorder of Shanghai, an English- woman, Miss Sophie Lanneau, reveals to us the presen state of Chinese poetry. She informs us that a great literary renaissance is crowning the national and social revolution: a pro- found renaissance, a complete upset- ting of the source of inspiration and the complete renovation of the means of expression valid up till now. Hav- ing-given up the classic, style refined by centuries of bureaucratic and feudal culture, the poets now very often sing in “Bau hwa,” the language formed and epoken by the people, And their songs are not an upsurge of chau- vinistic nationalism, but the expres- sion of a revelution at once national and @gocial, One percelvesin tem the echo of popular revolis. It is the har- monious and passion: transposition of all that rumbles in the masses, thefr resigned and suffering waiting, theff revolutionary unfurling. The spirit that moved Thomas Hood Shirt” in the early ‘paren en of Bng- found | everywhere, o Tune in on Sunday morning and you will find the air polluted with all sorts and manners of sermons and you will even hear Secretary of Labor Jimmy Davis leading a Sunday school at Mooseheart on the community of in- terests between capital and labor. We all know how poisonous is the propaganda spread over the: printed pages of the capitalist press, but more pernicious and poisonous than the cold type is the familiar and persuasive voice of the capitalist propagandist on the air. Every newspaper radio station has & women’s club and a children’s club. Of course, the grand ladies of gilded society hold sway and the working woman'simply listens in. There is one station in Chicago which has a chil- dren’s radio club with a membership of one hundred and sixty-five thou- sand, and they arte not merely listen- ers, but are actually an organization with a membership roll. Each child receives a membership certificate and badge. The newspaper which controls the station out of its own kindhearted- mess makes arrangements with movie houses in various neighborhoods to leave those children who show mem- bership in that particular club in at a reduced rate. This is only one of such capitalist clubs which poison the minds of the children of the working class. The working class is not permitted to use the ame stations for its pur- poses. Most stations demand copies of your speech before they allow you to speak, and therefore it is as im- possible to put over any working-class propaganda as for a camel to crawl thru the eye of a needle. Enemies of the workers always find their paths open to them. The same holy men and mystic fakers who half a cen- tury ago said it was heresy to believe that a train could run at the terrific speed of fifteen miles an hour because the lord did not want it so, did not hesitate to let their hypocritic voices travel at a hundred and. eighty-six thousand miles’ & #é@corid ‘over the ra- dio, during the Eucharistic Congress, most of the day. Nearly every sta- tion of importance was given over to catholic propaganda, The learned men of the bourgeoisie are already writing books on the “eco- Rhomics of the radio.” Some profes- of the Cloth Seller”: Big sister weaves the cloth—big brother sells the cloth—sells the cloth and buys rice—to fill their stomachs, Big sister wefives the cloth—big brother sells the cloth—baby has panties torn—no cloth to repair them. Big sister weaves the cloth—big brother selis the cloth—who will buy the cloth?—the rich man of the vil- lage below. The home-made cloth is coarse— the foreign cloth is fine—the for- eign cloth is theap—ét is that the rich mah prefers. The home-made cloth, no one wants it—let us perish of hunger, brother and sister! Hu-Sub, the dominating figure in the new literature and the leader in the battle against the bonzes (priests) of the petrified orthodoxy, speaks of the ‘thisery of the enslaved children: “Rickshaw, Rickshaw.” A _ rick- shaw comes with great speed, The passenger looks at the run- ner. All at once his heart becomes sad and sombre. The passenger asks the runner: “How old are you? Since-when have you been pushing your rickshaw?” The runner replies: “I am thir- teen years old, I have been pushing my rickshaw for three years. Do not doubt my words.” r The passenger says: “You are too young. I shan’t take your rickshaw. It would pain my heart.” The runner says to the passenger: “I have not had any work since day- break and I am cold and I am hun- ery. Your.good heart won’t fill my empty stomach. ~ > sors even suggest that the radio will solve the ills of the world. In Amer- ica the radio will keep the workers contented to a better advantage than the Victrola or the automobile and make him forget the struggles and bit- terness of his everyday life. All the honeyed words of class col- laboration do not prevent the capital- ist class and its government from try- ing its utmost to keep the voice of labor from the air, In this ease we may consider how little all the con- nections and@pwll of the officials of the Chicago Federation of Labor with the capitalist politicians availed them when the question of permittiig its radio station was raised. It was only after.a ruling by the attorney general that Hoover and the department of commerce did not have any rights to control the air that the license was is- sued to the Federation. We understand that. labor under cap- italism cannot hope to compete with its masters in technical perfection or in capacity to put over a tremendous amount of propaganda. “But in the present stage it can take advantage of whatever opportunity is offered it. The Communists are always accused of being harsh with their criticism, so we will try to be mild with our criti- ism of the only labor broadcasting station in the country, the WCFL, the station of the Chicago Federation. This station advertises its opening hour to be for speeches, announce ments, etc. It is to be hoped that in the future they will actually use it. So far they use it very sparingly. The type of music on its program does not in the least distinguish it from any capitalist station on the air. The world today is fraught with labor hap- penings and strnggies which could be brought to the attention of hundreds of thousands of workers to whom true interpretation of news is denied in the capitalist sheets. For instance, not a word did we hear of the imprisonment of the I. L. G, W. pickets, the Passaic textile strike, nor the events invChina which are charged with greatest’im- port to the workers. In closing, we hope that WCFL will go to the same trouble in placing the microphone in convenient location for broadcasting of labor issues and events by repre sentatives of labor as it did for the ~“antidabor Mayor Dever of Chicago. Revolution and Poetry in China “The police do not forbid me to conduct my rickshaw, young*as I am. Who are you to trouble me 60?” The passenger shakes his head, takes his place in the rickshaw and says: “Take me to the department of the interior, in the west.” - And here is the “Song of Labor”: _ “You sow the fields—I weave the clothe makes tiles to cover the houses—Hang Ho! Hang Ho! Hang Ho! Hang Ho!! Work eight hours— rest eight hours—study, learn eight hours—each and every one demand to live and work hard, - “Learn to read—study books—th workers are not stupid from birth— Read and learn—learn and read— study eight hours—rest eight hours ~—work eight hours. All wish to learn and work hard.” A great poem entitled: “Chi Kyung (Speed Up Production) has “seized with horror” the translator who gives us the last stanza of the poem: Faster! Work! From dawn to night, Fourteen hours, fifteen hours, Faster!~ Faster! Faster—to old age—misery—-death! Faster! Faster! Break the chains around the neck of the worker! Destroy the prison built by capt talism! What is the true civilization? Take hold of it and crush it; leave nothing of it! There are no riches. Wheré is poverty? Where is the common weal? Use your strength with all your courage, Flowers. of the reddest heartt Faster! Faster! . i j ‘